Prospecting Activities To Make More Sales When You Don’t Do Cold Calling

If cold calling people or sending cold emails to them to sell them something is your jam. Well, my friend, you’re not going to like this episode. In fact, you’ll probably outright hate it because I hate getting cold emails in cold calls, so I’m not going to do it for my business. Now, I’ve shared this on other podcasts that I’ve been a guest on, and people leave hate comments in the chat like I’ve done on this on a couple YouTube videos, YouTube podcasts, and I get any comments cracks me up. But I don’t really care. I hate getting cold emails. I’m not going to do that to grow my business. If you don’t mind getting those emails, if you don’t mind getting those phone calls and you don’t mind sending them out, bugging people when they’re not looking to buy your thing, well, then, my friend, go right ahead and do it. But for me and my house, we will not send cold calls or cold emails. But there is still a lot I do for prospecting activities to bring new leads in to my pipeline that are warm, that I can call I can email, and I can nurture them to lead to a sale. I’m going to share all of those things in this episode. Welcome to the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur podcast. My name is Eric. I am a full time digital nomad entrepreneur traveling around the world with my wife and our four kids. And we are having an amazing experience. We’re able to do this because of my digital marketing agency in transit studios. And if it wasn’t for that as well, if it wasn’t for us having a successful business, this would be a different story. We would struggle with this lifestyle. So whether you want to be a full time traveler or not a full time traveler, but you want to have the location independent and have the freedom you’re going to need to make money. It’s just that simple. And every dollar you’re ever going to make it, unless it comes from somebody else, if you’re going to make the dollar yourself, if you’re going to own a business, then every dollar you’re ever going to make in business is going to start as a lead. And so many times I talk to people that I’m doing coaching with that they think the key is just finding the right lead generation strategy. You know, if they can just figure out the right Facebook ads. And so they try some Facebook ads and guess what? That doesn’t work. And so so they go over and they sign up for this program, and they’re going to they’re going to learn to do get leads via LinkedIn. And so they take this course and they start doing some LinkedIn things and and that doesn’t work. So they go over here and they take this course and oh, oh, I’m going to create a Facebook group and people are going to sign up for my Facebook group and then they’re just going to give me money. And so this is because this person and Instagram said that that’s what they did and they they now make $100,000 an hour. Okay. That’s an exaggeration. But we see these things and we get excited about them. We go after them. And here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. Most of those work, most of those will work for you, but you don’t stick to it long enough, or you don’t take the time to figure out the principle behind the practice and figure out why is it working for them. You’re not you know, you’re not re-engineering a reverse engineering success. And so what I want to encourage you to do is just choose one of those. Just choose one. There are four kinds. There are four categories that I think lead gen falls in. And and one of them is code emailing. You can be doing that. You do send cold emails and cold calls. That’s that’s category one that I loathe. The second category is content. You create content. You can have a blog. You have the YouTube channel. You can you can do social media content. You can you know, there’s all kinds of ways to create content and you can do it. You got to create a lot of it and you got to get really, really good at it and you got to do it for a really long time. But content is a great way to go. There’s nothing wrong with that. A third is paid. You can pay for ads. You pay for ads on meta pay per click. Tick tock. LinkedIn. Like. Just choose one of them and do it. I don’t like paid ads as a way to go because you turn the ads off the lead. Stop. Not my not my cup of tea. I don’t want to do that. But you can. That’s fine. There’s a place for it. There’s a time and a place to supplement. We do run some ads. It’s not for direct lead generation. We run ads to grow our Facebook page and then we directly market to those people. But that’s that’s different. That’s different. It’s not our primary thing. Our primary is referral and networking. I love referral and networking. It’s my favorite way to do it. We’ve got strategies that work for this. Even when I’m a digital nomad and as a digital man, I can’t be going to networking events. You know, I still prefer this method over all the other methods. Now, within here, there’s lots of ways to do networking and referral, and so it’s just where we live. So what is this? What do we do when it comes to the prospecting? And we hear that and I think a lot of people think, well, prospecting is is cold calling people. And so if I’m not cold calling people, then I don’t have any prospecting to do. And that’s wrong. I think you should be spending if this is if you are full time, if you’ve reached the point where this is your full time gig, you should be doing prospecting an hour a day, an hour a day. And I’m going to give you a list of what this might look like. But I think you should spend an hour a day now. If you can’t do an hour right now, do a half hour can do a half hour, do 15 minutes, but set aside some time to do 5 minutes, if that’s all you can do. But start getting in the habit of having a set time every day that you’re going to do prospecting. And here’s the goal with prospecting. It’s not to make a sale. The goal with prospecting is to schedule a call. That’s right. That’s the goal. You’re prospecting you’re you’re you’re putting the effort in to make the appointment that you can get on that. And how it looks for me is during my prospecting time every day, I’ve got a list of prospects, a list of list of potential customers that I am contacting to try to set up what we call an initial discussion, a free consultation, if you will. And then from in that meeting, I gather the information we need to create a digital marketing blueprint, which is my sales proposal. I use a two step consultative sales process. Some people don’t like that sales process. They do. They do a one call closed. Like if they can’t close you on the one call, then and then you go back to the drawing board like that’s a that’s fine. I don’t care about that. Some people will do the initial discussion and then they email the proposal. Okay. You’re lengthening the buying time, but you can you can do that. You can do that, especially if you’re a solopreneur and you don’t have a lot of time to do those extra meetings. That’s that’s one way to do that. I don’t do that anymore because, like I said, it increases the buying time and I want a short buying cycle. So I though take time every day to schedule appointments. That’s my prospecting. Again, a lot of people think, well, that’s just you got it. You got to call a cold list. That’s that’s not true at all. So what is it? What does it look like? What is what is some prospecting look like? In fact, maybe there’s a way to build a system around this. You know, I love systematizing for success and I love building systems that that are predictable. Predictable outcomes and make us money. Those are my favorite systems, the systems that make us money. And my prospect system is one of those. And the first thing I do is, is I put together a pipeline. In fact, any time I work with any of my anybody doing coaching, the very first thing I do is make sure they have a pipeline. You know, this could be Post-it notes on a wall. It could be, you know, a Google spreadsheet. You could use a tool. There’s all kinds of ways to do this. You just need a pipeline, a way to capture every opportunity. And and your pipeline is going to have different stages going to different columns. You know, and you can have four. You can have eight, you could have ten. You know, it’s your system you have at it. And so what I want you to try to picture in this audio podcast, you don’t close your eyes if you’re driving or mowing the yard or crossing the street or doing something like that. But if you’re doing an activity routine, encourage close your eyes. Maybe you want to close your eyes and try to visualize this. But but what you’re picturing is you’re just picturing a set of columns. Columns go up and down. Rows go left and right. You’re just picturing a whole bunch of columns. A whole bunch of columns, a whole bunch of buckets if you want to. But, you know, I prefer columns. There’s a whole bunch of columns. And the very first column, I label it untouched. Okay. These are untouched opportunities. People that I want to contact, people that I can make contact with, that I’m going to try to schedule an appointment in the very next column is called is labeled scheduling initial discussion because that’s what I’m doing. So what I do is I want to keep that second column full. So I look for people in untouched that I rate. And I get better at this over time and I move them from untouched in to scheduling ID and then every day I’m contacting those people and scheduling ID until I get a hold of them and move them to i d scheduled initial discussion schedule. That’s it. Now for me, I need to have two of these per week. Some seasons in our business, I need to do five. I need to do five of these in a week. Right now, we’ve pulled back. We’ve tapped the brakes a little bit. We are only looking to onboard one client per month because we were focused on making our product really, really, really great. So to have time to work on our product, to work on our systems, we we can’t be launching a project every week, which is what I really like to do, but we’ve got to get some things organized. We’re working on our business a little bit, but so I need to start one project a month. Okay, at least two weeks in between. Sometimes I’ll do two a month, but I want two solid weeks between starting projects because that gives us time to to work on our product, to work on our business and make it even better. That’s just where we are right now. So right now I need two initial discussions a week. And so I look at my calendar every day. Every morning I look at the calendar for next week and I ask myself, do I have to initial discussion scheduled or do I do I have if it’s a week, I need five, maybe it’s five, maybe there times I needed ten. You know, it just it just depends on whatever my measurement is. I look at the calendar the next week and I go, what do I what do I need next week? What’s my goal? Well, I mean, I need to do I have to know. Okay, time to make some calls and I’m going to start calling people through my scheduling. I’d list that I’m trying to get a hold. Hey, are you available? I’m just curious if you want, if you have time next Tuesday to talk about, you know, growing your business. And that’s not how I say it. But, you know, I’ve got a little bit of a a script I use, but I get on the phone. People want to know if you’re available next Tuesday at two, Thursday at three, whatever it is. I’m just and I’m not trying to do any sales activity in this call. I’m just making the call, leaving a voicemail, talking to them. Because the moment I get to scheduled next week or five or ten, whatever my whatever season I’m in right now, it’s to what I get to schedule for next week. I’m done. I’m not making any more calls this week. Why would I make more calls this week? I’ve got the two I need for next week. Next Monday. I’ll look at the week after. I’ll look at the following week. We’ll have the calls I need next week. Oh, I don’t have. I got. I got to make. Got to, got to get the calls made, the call scheduled. And I do that because I know that those initial discussions are going to lead to blueprint presentations. And I know my close rate and I know that by doing that, I’m going to get my one two projects a month, like not going to be a problem. It is going to happen. But who am I calling? That’s the thing. Who am I calling? That’s who’s. Who gets into the first column. Who gets into untouched. Some people will go out no by a big list. That is by a list. They’ll spend several hundreds of dollars and they’ll get a list and they’ll dump it in that first column and then they start moving them over That’s cold calling. And I don’t like doing that. So. So what do I do? Well, I’ve got a whole list here. Let me let me go through on request. The first thing I want you to start with, if you’ve never done this before, is fa fa. Now, if you’re listening, you’re like, What the heck is Papa? I’m going to tell you? Well, before I tell you, would you do me? Would you would you leave a review? Would you do would you leave a review? Leave a rating? Subscribe. It’s how I know you’re out there. It’s how I know you’re getting something out of it. I know it’s how you’ve been listening for 14 minutes. You’ve made it to this point in it. It would just it would mean the world to me. It lets me know that. Yeah, keep doing it. People are finding this helpful, you know, it’s benefiting people. It’s the only reason I’m doing this. I like to teach and this gives me a chance every week. This gives me an outlet every week to teach something. And it would mean the world if you would say thank you to me by leaving a rating, a review, subscribe, share, tell somebody about it, you know, or send me an email. Eric at D and E podcast dot com send send me an email and let me know what you want to hear about. Hey, I’d like to hear a podcast episode about this. Hey, I got a question about this that that would be great. All right. So back to how do I fill up my list of people that I can call that I can reach out to to get them scheduled for my initial discussions? So that way I’ve got I’ve got money coming in in the future when I need it. All right. Well, start with the FA whose fa fa friends, family and relatives. Okay. And for this one, friends, I go kind of broad, okay? I go pretty wide with friends. Can I tell you next week I have a meeting with the director of the language school my wife is attending in Costa Rica. Why? Because anybody we give money to on a pretty regular basis. I’m going to ask them at some point about their website. I’m going to reach out to them and say, Hey, Mr. Pediatric Dentist, I was looking at your website. And by the way, you know, thanks for doing a great job with my kids. Last week I was looking at your website and you would get more phone calls if you did these three things. And so I hope you found these helpful. If you’d like any more tips or anything, let me know. I send out a weekly marketing email newsletter I could put you or somebody from your staff on it. Just reply back and let me know. Thanks. I send them something. I send them some tips, some ideas. What did it cost me? 2 minutes. Okay, 2 minutes. And I’m giving them something nice. Because here’s the truth. You reap what you sow. Okay. Give first one to give first economy. Give somebody some ideas, give them some suggestions, give them some tips. It’s weird if you don’t know them. I can’t stand it when people message me. And I was looking at your website, but rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, we can do this. You don’t know me. It’s a code. I don’t. I don’t like it. But hey, you know Mr. Dentist, who just had your hands in my mouth? You know, we know each other. We’re like. We’re like BFFs now. Okay, you were staring into the to the throat of my children, you know, grinding on their their teeth, scraping away, like, let’s let’s let’s talk business now. Let’s talk shop. Okay, so I do this with the kid, you know, sports clubs. My kids have been in a mechanic. I’ve used more than once. And if it is somebody I’ve done business with or do business with now, you know, I consider, you know, I’ll I’ll reach out to them, you know, if it if it’s that if we’re friends, if I have that relationship with you, I’m going to do that. Okay. Friends, family, relatives. Who do you know that has a website or who do you know that knows other? Do you have somebody in your business that is a commercial realtor? Oh, my goodness. I love commercial realtors because they are meeting with new people every month. They’re starting new businesses because they’re looking for commercial real estate to maybe expand. Maybe they’re maybe they’re a growing business. Maybe they’re a new business. Oh, my gosh. I love talking to commercial realtors and saying, hey, listen, you know, you’re out there meeting. You’ve got the same audience with a different offer. But you and I have the same audience. You have your audience is business owners. My audience is business owners. But you get them in the property, I get them, you know, website so they can continue to afford that property, which helps you out. Hello? Hello, Mr. Mrs. Realtor helps you out as you’re. As you’re meeting with people. I man, if you can find out if they need a website and put us in touch, that would be great. I would really appreciate that. And as I’m working with clients that are starting to expand or grow, I’ll find out. Oh, I’ll ask all my clients as I’m meeting with them. By the way, just got here. Are you happy with your business location? Because I’ve got a I’ve got a commercial realtor. I’ll just I’ll pitch you, buddy. Like, I. I loved doing that. Okay. So friends, family, relatives, don’t contact them right now. You might be thinking, Oh, Uncle Bob, I’m going to call Uncle Bob’s a commercial realtor. No, what you’re going to do is you’re going to write Uncle Bob commercial, real. Are you going to write down on a Post-it note and you’re going to put it in your untouched column, or you’re going to type it into a cell in a Google spreadsheet or onto a card in a willow board. Like, however you create this right now, you just gather, you just everything. Don’t filter it. Get an well, I don’t know if I want to contact them. You’ll filter later right now. Just put them on there. Just put on there. Here. Here’s an auction. Current and past clients current and past month I reach out to current and past clients all the time. Okay. And so when my when my untouched board list starts getting low, I go back through. And are there any past clients, you know, that put them back out, reach back out, see how life is going for them. Okay. Current clients that aren’t paying us for all of our services but I know would benefit them. I’m going to reach out to the next group I’ll I’ll put on here is lost opportunities. If I lost an opportunity I have to talk to them for three months. I’m going to reach back out and I’m reach out three months again. I’m going to reach out three months again because maybe the person they hired flakes on them. I have had that happen to number. Well, yeah, we hired somebody and you know, things are going we can’t get them to get back in touch with us now, you know. Oh, wow. Sorry. That person you just paid $100 to to build, you know, $5,000 websites disappeared off the face of the planet. Gee, Mr. Business Owner, I don’t know why. Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m here. Let me help you out. All right. So I put on lost business opportunities more than three months, and I work through the networks, other, other people and networks I belong to. If I belong to a network, I’m going to reach out to people, hey, we’re in this. We’re both in the same same group. Well, I know if we just meet up, get to know each other a little bit, like, I’m not I’m not necessarily looking for the sale. I’m just looking for the initial discussion. I just want to know how long you’ve been in business. What’s your favorite part about being in business? What’s the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome? What’s your biggest challenge right now? You know, you know what? What are you are you are you getting enough leads or customers? Are you getting enough of your leads or customers to come back to you? Are you getting enough reviews? Like I want to find out in that initial discussion. And just before recording this, I was talking to one of my. Coaching clients. And he said, Yeah, but the thing is, when you tell me these stories, I can’t think of the things as fast as you do. And I told him I was like, Yeah, but I’ve been doing it for a long time, and maybe you’re sitting there and you don’t just give yourself permission not to think of anything. Just listen, write things down and then go home and Google how to solve a problem. This person’s problem. Ask in a Facebook group, you know you’ve got one on one coaching with me. You’ve got direct access to me through Marco Polo in between coaching sessions. Send me a marco Polo. But, you know, now on your way home with me. Hey, I just had coffee with with so-and-so. And they said their biggest challenge right now is recruiting staff. And I’m going to message you back. And I would say, hey, go look and see what they have on their website. Do they do they have an easy way for people to schedule a 15 minute culture interview to see if they’re a good fit or they want people to fill out an application that’s going to take them 3 hours? No one will fill out their online application until they get some of their questions answered. So call them tomorrow and say, Hey, listen, I was thinking about your problem, about recruiting. And I looked at your website last night and I thought, you know, your your page where you’re listing employment opportunities, you know, people fill out a big application. In today’s day and age, that’s people aren’t going to do that. You should you should have a way for people to schedule a real quick, you know, ten minute, 15 minute, basically free consultation, initial discussion or or culture interview to see if they’re a good fit. All right. Let them ask some of their questions then. If you like them and you want them to go a step further, then you send in the application. And I told him, Man, we’ve done this with customers and it’s significantly improved their customer or I’m sorry, there’s their staff recruitment. Okay. But, you know, I can’t think of those things at every meeting on the spot, follow up afterwards, and they’re gonna be like, wow, thank you. You know, you’re somebody that listens to my problem. Came back with a suggestion. Thank you. Even if they don’t buy it, even if they buy from you, they’re going to remember that for a long, long time. So I if I’m in a network, if I’m at an organization, I’m adding people on my untouched column and I’m going to reach out to them. I’ve got email magnet, downloaders, that’s my necklace list. I’ve got email magnets out there. And every time somebody downloads my my email magnet, they go right to the top of my list. And yes, I’ve got email automations that are going out for nurture and stuff like that. But I may just if I’m really needed to, I’m going to interrupt that flow and I’m going to send a personal email. Okay. You know, so I’ve got my my email magnet downloaders on there. I’ve got webinar attendees. Maybe you don’t do a webinar. That’s okay. But I do webinar attendees. They’re on there. They recycle through their every couple of months vendors. I kind of talk to them. I kind of included them in for far. But if you’re like, Oh, I’m not comfortable seeing my dentist as a friend, well then I’ve got covered here in this one vendors. I had all of my vendors to my list password across networking connections. Okay. And here’s how I like to do this. I like to think of, you know, who do I know or interact with on Facebook and are they on LinkedIn? Okay. So if I if I interact with somebody or know somebody on Facebook, I’m going to go over to a different network and I’m going to connect with them and start interacting with them over there because new people are going to see it. I’m going to start getting I’m going to start getting it becoming a known quantity to the people they know over there. And I’m going to start adding people to my my columns that way. The next one is referrals. I just ask. I just ask, who do you know that I should know? Hey, who? Who? You know, Mr. and Mrs. Client, we’ve worked together for six months here. Your result? Who? What other business owners? Do you know that I that I should know that would benefit from knowing from us? Okay. The next one on my list is I don’t do this one anymore because I’m a digital nomad. But when I was stationed in one place in the States, I would host live events and I would get people to sign up for the live events. And and they went on the the list. The next winner, people that email me, people that fill out a form on my website, you know, code emailers. I reach out to them or you know, you may want to use a service like Lavallee where it turns your form into of audio and and the system calls you and says, hey, so-and-so just filled out the form and here’s what they said. And you can push a button to dial the person back. LAVALLEE It’s absolutely amazing. Something to check out. The next group of people I’ll put on my list is strategic partnerships. You know, I’ve got people that we work with, customers, a client that I work with that again, have the same audience, different offers. And, you know, I’ve talked to them, you know, I’ll find out who they know. Well, you know, who do they have any recommendations? Referrals. Okay. So these are the people I’m constantly thinking through when I need to refill that list. How? Who do I know? How do I get into how to get referrals? What am I going to do? I’m constantly thinking and growing that list. Yes, I could go out and buy a list. I could do that, but I’d rather have a warm connection with someone. I’d rather have an introduction with someone. So these are all the things that I do. It’s I’ve never been short on leads. I’ve never been short on prospects because this because of today’s leadership tip of the week. And we’ll share that with you. Now, you may be thinking, what is this? If you’re in if you’re a first time listener, you might be thinking, dude, what’s this leadership tip of the week? I end every episode with the leadership tip of the week. Because your leadership capacity is the capacity of your business. Your business will not grow beyond your leadership skills. And so the. Without a doubt. You know, all these things I talk about on the podcast are designed to help you. You know, I talk. There are five processes your business needs. You need you need five core systems. You need a leadership system. You need a lead generation system. That’s what I was just talking about in this episode. A lead conversion system. I’ve talked about that collecting and managing money. You need systems for that. You need systems for project management. And so but all of those, the lead gen, lead conversion, collecting, managing money and project management, all of those are supported by your leadership. All of those are better or worse based upon your leadership. So what’s my leadership? Tip of the week plan outside of the pressure. Plan outside the pressure. Why do we have this whole long list of things that I can do to fill the top of my pipeline for prospecting? That’s not cold calling because I get away from my office. I used to do it once a week. I call it a CEO day. It started as an hour, once a month, you know, and then it became an hour a week and then it became a full day a week. And now it’s pretty much my job. But I called it CEO time and I would go and I would sit down and I would write out questions and I would go and I’d find a coffee shop to sit in. And one day one of my questions was, you know, what can what can I do to fill my pipeline? And I went and I just brainstormed ideas. And I had done some, you know, thinking and reading, listen to a couple of podcast episodes about prospects and things like that. And then when I went and sat down, had all of these ideas, I’d heard all this content I consumed, and I sat down and decided, what am I going to do? And I spent a good hour creating a list. And now I have this list. And I look at it all. I don’t have to sit here and go, Oh, no, what am I going to do? I don’t have enough prospects. My one of all do when the pressure is on, when I look and I go, Wow, I need some more prospects. I just open the list. I just open the list and I’m like, Oh, yeah, that’s right. I can do this. Oh, yes, right. I can do this. And I don’t have the pressure on him, the stress, because I planned outside of pressure. All right, my friend. Well, thanks for listening to this episode of the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur Podcast Episode 27. Can’t believe it. That’s so cool and exciting. So I’m looking forward to reading your review or your email. Make sure you do one of those. And remember, until next time, chase the big dream. Lead with courage and safe travels to all of you out there traveling.